in a 123-121 loss for the Dallas Mavericks<\/a>. No teenager has ever scored that many points in NBA history, and it’s also a Mavericks rookie record.<\/p>\nAdvertisement<\/p>\n
The latter record was previously co-owned by Flagg and Mark Aguirre. In a fun twist of fate, the Mavericks were retiring Aguirre’s No. 24 on Thursday night.<\/p>\n
Knueppel also posted a career high with 34 points on 10-of-16 shooting, including a franchise-record eight made 3-pointers, plus 4 rebounds and 3 assists. In addition to finishing one point shy of 50, Flagg had 10 rebounds and 3 assists while shooting 20-of-29.<\/p>\n
The game came down to both players. Flagg tied the game at 121 with a 3-pointer with 34 seconds left, but Knueppel got a steal at his expense on the next Dallas possession and ended up shooting a pair of free throws to take the lead.<\/p>\n
Flagg had a chance to tie the game and hit the half-century mark, but his buzzer-beater missed long after shooting through a double team.<\/p>\n
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Regardless of the result, Flagg continued to enter rare company at only 19 years old. In addition to having the most points by a teenager, he is now one of three players to post multiple 40-point games at 19 or younger, joining LeBron James and Anthony Edwards.<\/p>\n
The win is a welcome one for the 21-28 Hornets, who are now 2.5 games back from the Chicago Bulls for the final play-in spot in the Eastern Conference. Knueppel’s star performance continued a strong rookie year for the No. 4 pick pick, who ranks second among NBA rookies in points per game with 18.9, behind only Flagg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No NBA player younger than Cooper Flagg has scored more points than Flagg did on Thursday. Facing the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":570034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3724],"tags":[375,7,473,329,225,149,968,185,9088,6],"class_list":["post-570298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-anthony-edwards","tag-basketball","tag-charlotte-hornets","tag-chicago-bulls","tag-cooper-flagg","tag-dallas-mavericks","tag-kon-knueppel","tag-lebron-james","tag-mark-aguirre","tag-nba"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115982854137407042","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/570034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}